That statement surprises me because my impression had always been that GNU grep ...

burntsushi · on March 9, 2021

Look at the dates on the material you're reading. That should resolve most of your confusion.

Also, to be clear, in a strict apples to apples comparison, GNU grep and ripgrep will tend to have comparable performance. ripgrep does edge it out a bit in many cases, but it isn't always earth shattering. However, if you don't limit yourself to apples-to-apples comparisons and instead look at the user experience, then yes, ripgrep will likely be "a lot" faster. Primarily because of automatic parallelism and its "smart" filtering.

duckerude · on March 9, 2021

GNU grep is so fast that it set the bar for later implementations.

In your second link ripgrep is even marketed as having "the raw performance of GNU grep" (though it managed to exceed it).

arp242 · on March 9, 2021

When that was written in 2010 it probably was the fastest grep. It's not like GNU grep is completely devoid of any performance optimisations.

rcxdude · on March 9, 2021

It's a bit out of date (that email predates ripgrep). ripgrep goes even further in terms of skipping work, as well as focusing on parallelism.